Northern Gaza’s last remaining major hospital is now out of service after a raid by Israeli forces severely damaged the building and emptied its wards of patients and doctors.
On Friday, Israeli forces raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, putting some 75,000 Palestinians remaining in the north of the enclave at risk, the United Nations said. They also arrested the hospital’s prominent director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, accusing him of being a suspected “Hamas terrorist operative.”
The raid has rendered the hospital “empty” of patients, some of whom are critically ill, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Those in critical condition were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital, “which is itself out of function,” WHO said. Some patients were also transferred to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, WHO added.
The UN said that WHO is planning a mission to the Indonesian Hospital to move the evacuated patients to southern Gaza for continued care.
“The health system in the north is completely deteriorated,” he said. “We are working to save what is left.”
Salha said his hospital must wait for approval from the Israeli military to allow the Red Cross to move cases that require specialist treatment from the north of Gaza further south.
The raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital came amid renewed Israeli aerial and ground operations in several parts of northern Gaza, aimed at targeting what the IDF called a resurgent Hamas presence in the area. The onslaught has left streets as carpets of debris, killed entire families, and severely depleted food, water and medical stocks.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) over the weekend said it had detained at least 240 “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists” around the hospital, alleging the facility was being used as a “Hamas terror stronghold.”
It said Monday that troops had also “operated to identify and eliminate multiple terrorists in the area overnight.”
On Saturday, after detaining the hospital director, Dr Abu Safiya, the Israeli military claimed that the facility was being used by Hamas as a “command and control center.” The military did not provide any evidence to support the claims.
Abu Safiya’s arrest was met with outrage by Palestinians, the UN and rights groups.
Amnesty International on Sunday called him “the voice of Gaza’s decimated health sector,” adding that since the war, “Israel has detained hundreds of Palestinian healthcare workers from Gaza without charge or trial.”
In a statement on X, Amnesty said that “health workers have been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment and been held in incommunicado detention” by Israel.
Trickling aid
As Gaza’s northern hospitals are forced out of service, aid is barely reaching the few hundred thousand Palestinians still trapped in the area.
Since October 6 of this year, when Israel’s concentrated operation in the north began, 5,565 truckloads of aid have entered the enclave, according to data from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Since December 1, Israeli authorities have denied 48 of 52 UN attempts to coordinate humanitarian access to northern Gaza, OCHA said on December 24, adding that the “four approved movements all faced impediments.”
OCHA’s database says that on December 26, 27 truckloads of aid entered Gaza. There are no records of aid into the enclave after December 26, according to the UN database.
Jonathan Whittall, acting head of office at OCHA, said on Monday that his team has been denied entry into northern Gaza more than 140 times.
“We don’t have the ability to provide the level of assistance that is needed to meet the most basic requirements,” Whittall said in a video posted on X.
“The basics of human survival are being destroyed in Gaza,” he said.
However, the IDF said on Saturday that prior to its weekend operation against Kamal Adwan in north Gaza, it evacuated patients and delivered “tens of thousands of liters of fuel, food, and medical supplies.”
According to COGAT, the Israeli agency that approves aid shipments into Gaza, one fuel truck went to northern Gaza for the refueling of bakeries, the group said on Monday.
The multiple humanitarian crises in Gaza – food shortages, lack of shelter and medicine – have been compounded by a snap of cold weather. Gaza’s Health Ministry said a 20-day-old newborn died from the cold, the fifth in the last week.
One surgeon in Gaza, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, said on X that hypothermia, malnutrition and injury represented the triad of death. “In Gaza this means that people will die of hypothermia at higher temperatures, will starve to death much quicker and will succumb to less severe wounds,” he wrote.